1. Field
This invention relates to a method and apparatus for desktop redaction and masking.
2. Description of the Related Art
Increasingly, users of information technology (IT) systems are required to handle sensitive information, such as personal identifiable information (PII), sensitive personal information (SPI), and information that is otherwise of a secret, sensitive, or proprietary nature.
Solutions are known in the enterprise environment for redacting, masking, and otherwise anonymizing or privatizing information either at rest, within a database, file system, or other static structure, or in flight, upon a communications wire, pipe, socket, or similar. In general, these solutions work within a predefined structure, associated with one or more enterprise applications, databases, and/or the customer's network and operating system infrastructure. For ad-hoc use, however, on a user's graphical workstation (for example on Windows operating system, Mac OS X operating system, or Linux operating system), there is no practical solution for day-to-day use by enterprise workers. Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the US and other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
In the current art, each individual user must convert the information to specific formats or move the information into a specific application, then trigger redaction software. This is because existing solutions require the information to be in a particular document format or to be moved to a specific application for a redaction or masking solution to be able to ingest, analyze, and redact or mask the information. These limited solutions are restricted to specific client applications (part of enterprise grade redaction systems); or else they rely on application-specific plugins, some of which connect to redaction systems, and some of which offer a more limited functionality based only on patterns, such as regular expressions, that can filter contents.
When a user wants to move sensitive information available within one or more standard graphical application environments (such as a browser or desktop application), it is natural to use standard copy/paste and drag-and-drop operations, but in the current art this leaves the sensitive information unprotected and as-is.
There is a strong need for a convenient redaction solution which can be part of the day-to-day activity of an enterprise user. In this use case, the originating user has full access to the document so such a solution does not need to protect the data from the originating user.
Rather, it would be advantageous to increase compliance rates by making sure that as the user conducts his or her ordinary work, moving around information and sending it out as needed, the redaction or masking of PII and SPI is a completely natural and straightforward part of her ordinary workflow.